Via Chicago
“Phil Everly, whose high, close-harmony singing with his older brother Don made the Everly Brothers one of the biggest rock and country acts of the 1950s and early 1960s, died on Friday at the age of 74, the Los Angeles Times reported,” Reuters reports.
“Phillip Everly was born on January 19, 1939, in Chicago, the son of two country musicians, Ike and Margaret Everly.
“With Ike Everly on guitar, the family was a traveling act and had a radio show in which Phil and Don performed between commercials for XIP rat poison and Foster’s 30-minute Wonder Corn and Callus Remover. Legendary Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins was one of their earliest supporters.”
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“Don was born in 1937 in Brownie, Kentucky, to Ike and Margaret Everly, who were folk and country music singers,” Sky News reports.
“Phil was born to the couple on January 19, 1939, in Chicago where the Everlys moved to from Brownie when Ike grew tired of working in coal mines.
“The brothers began singing country music in 1945 on their family’s radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa.
“Their career breakthrough came when they moved to Nashville in the mid-1950s and signed a recording contract with New York-based Cadence Records.”
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“In the ’50s, the Everly Brothers arrived like a mirage from some deep Southern dream – boyishly handsome, guitar-playing siblings whose voices blended into something haunted, almost mystical,” Greg Kot writes for the Tribune.
“When we first heard it, it blew us away,” Paul McCartney once said of the Everlys’ “All I Have to do is Dream,” one of a string of hits Phil and Don Everly had in the late ’50s and early ’60s that transformed pop music.
“The sound of ‘All I Have to do is Dream’ echoed through the minds of the still-nascent Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys and countless other soon-to-be-icons.”
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Rare Everly Classic: Hey Doll Baby.
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The Everlys Covering A Dylan Classic.
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Others Covering The Everlys.
John Fogerty (via Linda Ronstadt, of course).
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R.E.M.
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Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones.
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Willie Nelson and Sheryl Crow.
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Nazareth (song written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, but first recorded by the Everlys, followed by Roy Orbison, then Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris).
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Comments welcome.
Posted on January 7, 2014